Survival...Zero

by Mickey Spillane

  Larry Beers wouldn’t be renting his gun out to the highest bidders any more. One slug that had gone right through him and grazed me was still imbedded in the carpet, a misshapen oval of metal standing on edge. There were no alarms, no sirens, no voices; the office building was deserted and we were too high up for gunshot sounds to reach the street.

  I stood up and looked around at the absolute destruction of all my new furniture, the mess of cotton batting from torn cushions, papers from the emptied files and remnants of furniture that had been systematically destroyed. But they had started to work from one side to the other and stopped three quarters of the way across. I knew what had happened. They had located the automatic taping system built into the wall behind the street map of New York City. Somebody had played it. Then somebody had destroyed it. The ashes were still warm in the metal wastebasket in the corner of the room.

  Like a sucker punch in the belly the picture was clear. There was a call on that tape, probably from Velda. It meant something damn important, enough to kill for. Now one was dead, but the other was still loose and if Velda had identified herself they’d know who to look for and probably where. If she had gotten hold of something she’d want to meet me and would have set a time and a place.

  Larry Beers, Ballinger’s boy. Out of curiosity I looked at the bottom of his shoes, saw the half-moon-shaped pieces of metal imbedded in the heels that old lady Gostovitch had called clickers and felt good because one was down who deserved it, and the one paying the price would be the guy who ran off and the one who was paying for the hit. It was Woody I had to find before he found Velda. There was one little edge I still had, though. They couldn’t be sure I wasn’t dead, and if I wasn’t I’d be looking for Woody too, and he had to reach me fast because he knew he’d be on my kill list just as sure as hell.

  Behind me a small, frightened voice said, “Mike ... ”

  Renée was standing in the doorway, hands against the frame, her face white and drawn. She saw the body on the floor but was still too dazed to realize what had happened. She tried a painful smile and lifted her eyes. “I ... don’t think I like your friends,” she said.

  CHAPTER 8

  There was no way of determining the actual cause of the wound, so the doctor accepted her explanation without question. The tip of an umbrella whipped in a sudden cross-directional gust had caught her, we said. He applied an antibiotic, a small compress she hid behind her hair and had me take her home. She still had a headache, so she took the sedative the doctor had given her, a little wistful at me having to leave, but knowing how urgent it was that I must. She had been caught up in something she had never experienced and couldn’t understand, but realized that it wasn’t time to ask questions. I told her I’d call tomorrow and went back into the rain again. My shirt was still sticking to my side with dried blood, stinging, but not painful. That could wait. The doctor never saw that one because he would have known it for what it was and a report would go in.

  Back in the office a body still sprawled on the floor in its own mess, a note to Velda on its chest to check into the hotel we used when necessary and hold until I contacted her. The door was locked, the “OUT” sign in place, now Woody Ballinger could sweat out what had happened.

  The night clerk in the office building had heard the elevator come down, but was at the coffee machine when the occupant left the lobby and all he saw was the back of a man going out the door. Four others had signed the night book going in earlier and he had assumed he was one of those. When I checked the book myself the four were still there on the second floor, an accountancy firm whose work went on at all hours. Woody’s boys had it easy. A master key for the door, time to go through my place and time to phone in whatever information they found on the tape. Then they just waited. They couldn’t take the chance of me getting that message and knew that if I did I’d want to erase it on the chance that Woody would make a grab for me after I made it plain enough to his boys that I was ready to tap him out.

  Okay, Woody, you bought yourself a farm. Six feet down, six long and three wide. The crop would be grass. You’d be the fertilizer.

  I stood under the marquee of the Rialto East on Broadway, watching the after-midnight people cruising the Times Square area. The rain had discouraged all but a few stragglers, driving them home or into the all-night eating places. A pair of hippies in shawls and bare feet waded through the sidewalk puddles and into the little river that flowed along the curb, oblivious to the downpour. One lone hooker carrying a sodden hatbox almost started to give me her sales pitch, then obviously thought better of it and veered away. She didn’t have to go far. A pair of loud, heavyset conventioneer types had her under their arms less than a half block away. What they needed around here was the old World War II G.I. pro stations. Nowadays the streetwalkers carried more clap than a thundercloud. Syph was always a possibility and galloping dandruff a certainty.

  Earlier, a dozen phone calls to the right people had gotten me the same piece of information. Woody Ballinger had been missing from the scene ever since this morning. Carl, Sammy and Larry Beers were gone too. I had lucked into snagging the apartment Carl and Sammy shared, but the doorman told me they had left in the morning and hadn’t returned. He let me confirm it myself by rapping on their door.

  And now I was worried. Nobody had seen Velda since four hours ago. Her apartment phone didn’t answer and the place she had taken opposite Lippy’s old place was empty. The small bag she had taken with a few extra clothes was in the closet, two sweaters on hangers and a few cosmetics on the ancient dresser beside the bed.

  When she worked in the field, Velda was a loner. Except for a few personal contacts, she didn’t use informants and stayed clear of places she would be recognized. But Woody knew her and if she were spotted it wouldn’t be too hard to grab her if they went at it right.

  I knew what she was wearing from what was left over in her luggage and had passed the word around. Denny Hill was pretty sure he had seen her grabbing a coffee and a hot dog in Nedick‘s, but that had been around seven o’clock. I found Tim Slatterly just closing his newsstand and he said, sure he had seen her early in the evening. She was all excited about something and he had made change for her so she could use the phone in the drugstore on the corner.

  “Thought she was a hooker.” Tim laughed. “You shoulda seen the getup she had on.” He pulled off his cap, whipped the rain off it and slapped it back on again. Then he looked at me seriously. “She ain’t really...”

  “No. She was on a job for me.”

  He let the smile fade. “Trouble?”

  “I don’t know. You see which direction she came from?”

  Tim nodded toward the opposite side of Seventh Avenue going north. “Over there. I watched her cross the street.” He paused a second, rubbing his face, then thumbed his hand over his shoulder. “Ya know, this probably was the closest place to call from. Two blocks up is another drugstore and one block down is an outside booth. If this one was closest she probably came from that block right there.”

  So she was in a hurry. She wanted to make a phone call. That could have been the one to me recorded on the tape that was destroyed. And what she found could have come from that direction.

  “You see her come out, Tim?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “She had a piece of paper in her hand. At first she started to flag down a cab, then gave it up and headed back over the West Side again. Look, Mike, if you want I’ll call over to Reno’s and the guys can

  “It’ll be okay, buddy. Thanks.”

  “Oh ... and Mike, she ever find that guy? The one with the fancy vest? She asked me about that too.”

  “When?”

  “That was, lemme see... right after I came on this morning. Like I told her, I see them things sometimes. One guy been coming here eight years always wears one. He owns a restaurant downtown. Rich guy. There’s another one, but he kind of drifts by once in a while at night. I figured him for a pimp.”

  I edged back under t
he protection of the overhang, the rain draping a curtain around us. “Tall and skinny, about forty-some?”

  Tim bobbed his head quickly. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Hell, about suppertime. He was still drifting along when everybody else was hustling to get outa the wet. I remember because the bum picked a paper outa the trash can somebody tossed away instead of buying one. A wet paper yet.” Tim stopped, watching me intently, then added, “So he started to cross the street heading west too. I wasn’t really watching.”

  “Good enough, Tim,” I said.

  And now the reins were pulling in a little tighter. The possibilities were beginning to show themselves. It was me who had put Woody onto it in the beginning. He had his own sources of information and it wouldn’t have taken him long to spot the association between Lippy and me and dig around the same way I did. If I had found anything Lippy’s former friend had lifted from Woody, the police would have had it by now and he’d be squatting on an iron bunk in the city jail.

  But no charges had been leveled, so whatever he was after was still up for grabs. I let the rain whip at my face and grinned pointlessly. So he double-checked Lippy’s pad with his boys and they damned near knocked me off. They had taken off fast, not knowing how long I had stayed around, and maybe if I looked hard enough I could have uncovered the item. It wouldn’t be big. Large enough for a wallet and easy enough to hide.

  It made sense then. They had to take me out to be sure. They ransacked my office first, then waited for me. They had to. After my bit earlier about “doing business” with Woody, he could have assumed I had the stuff and was ready to sell it to him. That would be “business” in his language. Or Velda could have come up with it and phoned in the information on the tape recorder and they couldn’t take a chance of me getting it. They’d try to tap me out first, then Velda.

  Damn it all to hell, why didn’t she stay in the office where she belonged?

  From a quarter mile down the avenue came a whine of sirens and tiny red dots winked in the night. I waited and watched another convoy of Army trucks rumble by, escorted by two prowl cars clearing the way. All of them were way above the speed limit. The last four were ambulance vehicles and a jeep. When they passed by I crossed to the other side of Seventh Avenue and started working my way west across town.

  At four A.M. I checked out a single lead and came up with a guy in a red vest, a stew bum conked out on wine, sleeping in a doorway on Eighth Avenue. I said something under my breath and walked down to the bar on the corner that was just about to close up for the night. I tried Velda’s apartment first, but there was no answer. I tried the hotel I wanted her to use, but nobody using our cover names had checked in. My office phone rang twice before it went to the recorder with the fresh spool I had inserted. There were no messages. By now Larry Beers’ corpse would be cold and stiff, his blood jellied on the floor. Pat was going to give me hell.

  He did that, all right, standing there over the body and chewing me out royally, his eyes as tired and bloodshot as my own. Outside the windows the sky had turned to a slate gray, the rain had stopped, but poised and waiting until it could be at its most miserable best when it let loose again.

  The body of Larry Beers had been carted off in a rubber bag, the room photographed, the basics taken care of, now two detectives were standing outside the door getting a muffled earful as Pat lit into me.

  All I could say was, “Listen, I told you I had a witness.”

  “Fine. It better be a good one.”

  “It is.”

  “You better have a damn good excuse for the time lapse in reporting this mess too.”

  “Once more for the record, Pat, my witness got hurt in the shuffle. I took her to a doctor who will verify it.”

  “He had a phone.”

  “So I was in a state of shock.”

  “Balls. You know the kind of lawyer Ballinger has to protect his men? You think that other guy’s going to admit laying for you? Like hell... they’ll say you set a trap and touched it off youself deliberately in front of a witness. Nice, eh? You were even supposed to get the other one, but he got away. So maybe your bullets aren’t in him. The other guy was firing in self-defense.”

  “Look at the office.”

  “You could have done that yourself. You told me you didn’t see them in the act of wrecking it. Your witness couldn’t help there, either.”

  “Well, you know better.”

  “Sure, I do, only I’m just a cop. I can investigate and arrest. I don’t handle the prosecution. Your ass is in deep trouble this time. Don’t think the D.A.’s office is going to buy your story on sight. What you think happened won’t cut any grass with that bunch. Even the shooting at Lippy’s won’t help any. That could have been staged too. You try using the witness you got there and all you’ll get is a cold laugh and a kiss-off. Even your own lawyer wouldn’t touch them.”

  “Okay, what do you want from me?” I asked him.

  “Who’s your witness, damn it!”

  I grinned and shrugged my shoulders. “You know, you forgot to advise me of my rights, Captain. Under that Supreme Court decision, this case could be kicked right off the docket as of now.”

  Pat let those red eyes bore into me for ten seconds, his teeth clamped tight. Then suddenly the taut muscles in his jaw loosened, he grinned back and shook his head in amazement.

  “I don’t know why I’m bothering with you, Mike. I’m acting like this is the first homicide I ever stumbled over. After all the nitheaded times you and I ... oh, shit.” He swabbed at his eyes with his hands and took a deep breath. “The whole damn country’s in line for extermination and I’m letting you bug me.” He dropped his hands, his face serious. “Anyway, by tomorrow you wouldn’t even make the back page.”

  I didn’t say anything. His face had a peculiar, blank look.

  Finally, Pat dropped his voice and said, “They found a canister at the bottom of the Ashokan Reservoir. It was a bacteriological device timed to open six days from now.”

  I couldn’t figure it. I said, “Then why the sweat if you got it nailed down?”

  Pat brushed some torn remnants off the arm of the chair and lowered himself down to it. “The guy found dead in the subway was the same one those honeymooners spotted, all right. They searched the area where they saw him and came up with the cannister.” His eyes left the window and wandered over to mine. “It must have been the last one he planted. It was marked #20—ASHOKAN. Someplace scattered around are nineteen others like it, all due to release in six days.”

  “And the papers got this?”

  “One of the reservists in the group that handled the stuff was a reporter fresh out of journalism school. He figured he had a scoop and phoned it in. He didn’t know about the other nineteen they didn’t find.”

  “There’s still time to squelch the story.”

  “Oh, they’re on that, don’t worry. Everybody connected with that guy’s paper is in protective custody, but they’re screaming like hell and they’re not going to be held long. There’s a chance they might have spouted off to their friends or relatives, and if they did, it’s panic time. People aren’t going to hold in a secret like that.”

  “Who’s handling it... locals?”

  “Washington. That’s how big it is.” Pat reached for his hat and stood up. “So whatever you do doesn’t really matter, Mike. You’re only an interesting diversion that keeps me from thinking about other things. Six days from now we can all pick out a nice place to sit and watch each other kick off.”

  “Brother, are you full of piss and vinegar tonight.”

  “I wish you’d worry a little. It would make me feel better.”

  “Crap,” I said sullenly. There was no mistaking Pat’s attitude. He was deadly serious. I had never seen him like that before. Maybe it was better to be like the rest of the world, not knowing about things. But what would they be like when they found out?

  “Six
days. When it happens you can bet there’s going to be some kind of retaliation, or expecting it, the other side fires first. A nuclear holocaust could destroy this country and possibly the bacteria too. If I were on the other side I’d consider the same thing.” Pat let a laugh grunt through his teeth. “Now even the Soviet bunch is thinking along those lines. I heard they all tried to get out of the country when we found the thing, but the Feds put the squeeze on them. In a way they’re hostages for six days and they’d better run down a lead before then or they’ve had it too.”

  “Sounds crazy,” I said.

  “Doesn’t it?” Pat waved me to the door. “So let’s have a coffee like it all never happened and then we’ll check into the ballistics report on those slugs that tore up your buddy Beers.”

  I lay stretched out on the bed, not quite awakened from the druglike sleep I had been in. The window was a patch of damp gray letting the steamy smells of the city drift into the room through the open half. The clock said ten after two, and I pulled the phone down beside me and dailed the office number. Nothing. Velda’s apartment didn’t answer either.

  Where the hell was she? Until now Velda had always called in at regular intervals, or if necessity warranted it, longer ones, but she always called. Now there were only two answers left. Either she was on a prolonged stakeout or Woody Ballinger had found her. I tried another half-dozen calls to key people I had contacted, but none of them had seen Woody or any of his boys. All his office would say was he had left town, but Chipper Hodges had gone into his apartment through a window on a fire escape and said his bags were in a closet and nothing seemed to be missing.

  Pat had slept in his office all night and his voice was still a hoarse growl with no expression in it at all. “Sorry, Mike,” he said, “still negative. Nobody’s seen Ballinger around at all.”

  “Damn it, Pat ...”

  “We’d like to see him, though. Ballistics came up with another item besides those slugs in Beers coming from that same gun that shot at you in Lippy’s apartment. That same gun was used to kill the cop who stepped into the cross fire when he was raiding that policy place uptown. Supposedly one of Woody’s places.”